"I've been working on organizational communication and change as a leader, consultant, and educator for the last 30 years or so. In 2005 I scaled back my consulting to make more room for writing and other activities. But I continued to get (welcome) calls from friends and clients who not infrequently said, "We're dealing with a major change; is there some tool or idea or framework that I can adapt and use to address [issue]..."

"Over the years I've built up a collection of change-related resources that I've used in many different settings. These include checklists, talking points, meeting agendas, model questions and answers, pitfalls to avoid, tactics to apply, and more. So it's usually not hard to come up with something that can be adapted to met the need: at least, to provide a starting point. After a while I began to think that perhaps I could organize this material and build a book around it. The result is Changemaking: Tactics and Resources for Managing Change.

"The book's focus is tactical. There are many excellent books dealing with change from a strategic level (why and how), and also a behavioral one (human reactions, feelings and commitment). There seem to be fewer looking at the basic steps needed to accomplish change, and providing tools and tactics. So I set out to answer questions such as: How do we actually go about understanding how our employees are reacting and why? How should we organize and run focus groups? What makes for an effective FAQ document? What goes into putting together an effective business case? How can we organize and run a workshop to plan change?

"Answers to these questions is what Changemaking provides."

Richard Bevan's experience is international, including periods based in Europe and Australia as well as the US. He has worked with organizations of every size and in a wide range of industries, as well as government and non-profits.

He has been a frequent speaker for forums such as The Conference Board and the International Association of Business Communicators, of which he is an accredited member. He has published a wide variety of articles, most of which are on topics relating to change and communication. He currently serves on the Board of Advisors for ROI Communication and as strategic communication advisor for Elliott Avenue Associates.

He is a graduate of Oxford University and Manchester Business School. His early experience was in manufacturing management with Lever Brothers, an instructive lesson in how organizational performance depends on the way that people are respected, engaged, led and rewarded. Later in his career, leading Towers Perrin's global communication practice through a period of major restructuring was another experience that influenced his approach to managing change.

He started his own firm, C2K Consulting, in 1995. For several years he was also an external faculty member at the University of Washington where he developed and taught a course on managing change for the Executive MBA program. The methodologies, tools and resources that he has developed, applied and tested as a leader, consultant and educator provided the framework for Changemaking.

Richard Bevan lives in Seattle. As well as his family, his non-business interests include cooking, sailing, biking, travel, reading and gardening. In 2010 he managed to combine half of these pursuits in a sailing trip across the Atlantic from St. Lucia to the Azores, on which he was responsible for provisioning, cooking and the blog. The Galley Slave’s Handbook, based on his experiences during that voyage, was his first book. It beat Changemaking to publication by a few weeks.